“Child of a nation’s sorrow! Were there hope of thy breaking the tyranny of fate, thou shalt be Marcellus. Bring me handfuls of lilies, that I may strew the grave with their dazzling hues, and crown, if only with these gifts, my young descendant’s shade, and perform the vain service of sorrow.” Virgil, “who would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in his readers’ eyes,” had already spent some ten years on the _Æneid_, when in 19 B.C. he decided to devote three years to its revision and improvement amid the “famous cities” and scenes of Greece and Asia. It is in anticipation of this voyage that his friend Horace prays the winds to “Speed thee, O ship, as I pray thee to render Virgil, a debt duly lent to thy charge, Whole and intact on the Attican borders Faithfully guarding the half of my soul.” Augustus, however, met him at Athens and persuaded him to accompany his own return. But Virgil was never again to see Rome. He contracted a fever in Greece. It grew worse on the homeward trip; and he died, a few days after landing, in Brundisium, having reached the age of fifty-one. His tomb looks down upon the bay of Naples, “That delicious Bay Parthenope’s Domain—Virgilian haunt; Illustrated with never dying verse And by the Poet’s laurel-shaded tomb, Age after age to pilgrims from all lands Endeared.” —WORDSWORTH. INFLUENCE OF THE ÆNEID As to the success of the _Æneid_, it was immediate with poets and people. Two years after Virgil’s death Horace writes in his _Secular Hymn_:— “If Rome be all thy work, if Trojan bands Upon the Etruscan shore have won renown, That chosen remnant, who at thy command Forsook their hearths, and homes, and native town; If all unscathed through Ilion’s flames they sped By sage Æneas led, And o’er the ocean waves in safety fled, Destined from him, though of his home bereft, A nobler dower to take, than all that they had left.” —Translated by MARTIN. Some of the scholars, indeed, criticised it as having an undue simplicity, as coining new words and using old words, with new meanings, as borrowing too freely from Homer, as not written in chronological order, as containing anachronisms, etc. But within ten years it was as familiarly quoted by writers as we quote Shakespeare. It became the chief text-book in the Roman schools of grammar and rhetoric. The great writers of later days, like Pliny and Tacitus, show the profound influence of his style, which would seem to have gripped them as Goethe tells us Luther’s translation of the Scriptures affected his style, and as the King James version has left its indelible traces on English literature.